Definition of "Umbrella reinsurance"
Protection for all classes of business including automobile, fire, general liability, homeowners, multiple peril, burglary, and glass, by combining the contracts for these classes of business into one reinsurance contract. This enables the cedant to obtain reinsurance more cheaply, with greater capacity, and with greater spread of risk. An umbrella reinsurance contract is offered to one set of reinsurers who all take a fixed percentage of every treaty in the contract. One reinsurer may take 5% across the board, another may take 10%, and so on, until the umbrella contract is totally placed. All the treaties that compose the umbrella contract are written as one block of business; hence, the reinsurers are prohibited from choosing which treaty they want to reinsure. By combining all the reinsurance treaties into one contract, if a catastrophe loss results, each reinsurer will assume only a percentage of the loss instead of assuming the entire loss by itself.
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